Safety Nets, Safety Valves, and True Alternatives: How Competing Discourses Shape Leaders’ Understandings of Alternative Education
Open Access
- Author:
- Cronin, Neil
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Leadership
- Degree:
- Doctor of Education
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 11, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Deborah Lynn Schussler, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Deborah Lynn Schussler, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Roger Shouse, Committee Member
Marsha Elizabeth Modeste, Committee Member
Dana Lynn Stuchul, Outside Member - Keywords:
- alternative education
discourse
narratives
beliefs
leadership
safety valves
safety nets
innovation
counter-narrative
complex meanings - Abstract:
- Alternative education is a broad and often contested concept. Beginning in the 1960s, the alternative education movement initially aimed to decentralize authority over schooling, providing educational options to students, families, and communities. For the early alternative education movement, the lack of rigid parameters around what alternative education is and what it is not allowed for innovation and rapid growth. However, over the last sixty years, distinct narratives describing alternative education have emerged, which create varied and even antithetical possibilities for how alternative education is understood. These narratives have formed discourses. Discourses construct social reality, determining what can be perceived as true, important, and possible. Three distinct discourses describe alternative education as creating: true alternatives, innovative schools that change teaching and learning; safety valve alternatives, schools that allow for the removal of “disruptive students;” and safety net alternatives, schools that provide support for students whose needs are not met by comprehensive schools. While the changing meaning of alternative education and the problems associated with it are well documented by research, a smaller number of studies examine the causes behind these changes. This study uses qualitative interview methodology to explore alternative school leaders’ understandings of alternative education’s purpose. Focusing on leaders who work within public-school district controlled, brick and mortar, alternative schools and programs in eastern Pennsylvania, this study explores the questions: how do alternative school leaders understand alternative education’s purpose and how do their understandings align with prevailing discourses? The findings of this study indicate that safety valve discourse, which describes alternative education as behavioral placements to which “disruptive students” are assigned, has become the dominant view of alternative education in eastern Pennsylvania. At the same time, this study found that many alternative school leaders hold complex beliefs about alternative education and their work, associating alternative education with multiple meanings, including support, innovation, and meeting the needs of students. For some participants, these complex meanings form counter-narratives, which challenge the assumptions inherent in safety valve discourse and redefine students as capable and the purpose of alternative education as helping all students realize their potential.